Rozalinda Borcila texts

im/migrations, a subjective introduction – editorial for AREA #11: A Local reader about how borders are made, experienced, and challenged through human movement (or, “This wholeillegals thing is bullshit”)

In 2010, the Eternal Tour project takes place in Jerusalem. Microsillons were invited to contribute to the publication; in turn, they invited me to a conversation which began from our shared political commitments in regards to pedagogy and art. Our conversation inevitably revolved around the cultural politics of the project itself, which we understand as best we can from the information provided by the organizers. Below is the draft version, publication due in December.

I have been teaching listening in social centers, free schools and universities. This project repurposes methods from musicology, structural acoustics and acoustic ecology, and leverages them toward a polticized understanding of space. It uses the workshop form; it is intended as a lived, live and living practice. “Three Lessons” is an attempt to produce an image/text interrogation of the practice. It draws upon Jérôme Grand’s response to the exercises, as well as his interests in the history of writing and design. To formalize aspects of the practice in page form, we thought of this collaboration as a kind of scribing, which for us raised questions about orality and literacy (the contingent shaping of listening, speaking, reading, writing and remembering), and about the process whereby co-operative, oral and memorized learning becomes enclosed as reading and writing.

This project was in response to an invitation by Ovidiu Tichindelanu to produce an essay for an anthology. In Radical Philosophy, Tichindeleanu describes this volume:

“ The Televised Romanian Revolution (2009) is a conceptual book that attempts to open a new critical space for the reflection of the decisive moment linking communism and postcommunism. The editors are considering the 1989 Revolution both as a global event and as the formative moment of the postcommunist culture industry and political sphere, tracing the shift of the meaning of postcommunism from the “Revolution of 1989″ to the “end of the Cold War.” The choice to consider the Revolution as a media phenomenon comes as an attempt to situate the revolution in a problematic field (as opposed to a disciplinary frame of meaning), and to give an alternative to the dominant interpretations of the “stolen revolution,” and of 1989 as the “end of all revolutions” (and consequent beginning of direct politics without any mediation). By looking at materialities of culture – such as the historical coincidence between the local political transition and the global technological transition of satellite and cable television – the televised revolution is situated in a field of immanence that allows a novel grasp on the global and local relations between mass media, capitalism, and power.”

My project became an intervention into the book form, beginning with a 10 second televisual clip from the very first CNN broadcast to contain images of Romanian Revolution of 1989. Previous broadcasts strained under a conspicuous absence of images — marking the territory/space of Romania as invisible, inaccessible; with this moment, a hypervisibility of the region in global televisual sites renders the “fall of communism” available for western mediatic penetration. My project isolates, extracts and expands (spatially and temporally) the introductory moment of the broadcast, in which the trope of the global victory of capitalism works both to produce Romania’s entrance into visibility and to frame the legitimacy and invisibility of the invasion of Panama.

This text was for a special issue of Maska entitled Re-projecting radical futures, which investigates “what alternative global visions and values can orient social movements, struggles and radical cultural practices in the coming period and what viable strategies remain for organizing collective agency and effective social struggle.”